Valley council may keep more electronic records

The Spokane Valley City Council took a look at how it keeps track of the business it does on the public’s behalf Tuesday, reviewing a new public records policy for the city as well as a concept for an electronic agenda that the council would view on laptop computers instead of on paper.

Currently the City Council, various city employees and members of the press receive a packet containing all of the reports, ordinances, memos, minutes and other items the council will review on a given week.

“That’s a lot of stuff for you to tote around,” said City Clerk Chris Bainbridge.

Making the 28 or so packets this week took four hours, she said, but compiling the documents digitally takes about 10 minutes.

For the last couple of weeks, she has posted all of the council’s materials at www.spokanevalley.org.

Under the proposal floated at Tuesday’s meeting, the council members would download that information to a tablet PC, which they could then jot notes on with a digital pen.

“I just think this makes total sense. We need to get in to the 21st century,” said Councilman Steve Taylor.

The reception was mixed among others at the dais, but the council told the staff to look further into the costs of paper copies and the price of acquiring new computers.

Others asked about downloading large documents on a slow connection or keeping up with multiple versions of complex documents like the yearly budget.

“That’s a bit of a nightmare when it comes to the simplicity of inserting page 22 and it replaces the old page 22,” in the budget, Councilman Mike DeVleming said.

“There’s multiple options that we can explore as we head down this road,” as far as making the documents easy to download and keep track of, said the city’s IT expert Greg Bingaman.

As an example, one of the city’s code enforcement officers demonstrated how he takes notes, updates documents and even acquires legal signatures in the field using a tablet PC.

City leaders also have expressed interest in doing more tasks digitally to reduce the expense and time of working with paper.

How the city stores all of those public records came under discussion during a later agenda item on public records policies.

By state directive, the council is preparing to adopt a new public records ordinance based on recommendations laid out by the state attorney general last year.

A separate administrative policy also will set up formal guidelines as to what kinds of documents city employees and the council have to hold on to.

“You can’t just, every 60 days, destroy everything” in your e-mail inbox, for example, said City Attorney Mike Connelly.

At the same time, Connelly said, many at City Hall are holding on to too much, and the policy would outline more specifically what records they are not obligated to save.

Among them: personal messages, cataloges, fax cover sheets and duplicates of e-mails sent to multiple people.

Other records on the list include “e-mails that convey non-policy informational messages” or preliminary drafts of letters, reports and the like, “which do not represent significant steps in the preparation of record documents.”

Following the initial presentation at Tuesday’s study session, the council will discuss the records policies further at a later meeting.